Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Sepia Saturday 318 : 20 February 2016

Our Sepia Saturday theme image for this week (Sepia Saturday 318 - post your posts on or around Saturday 20th February 2016) dates back seventy years to June 1949 and comes from the pages of Downbeat Magazine. It features that wonderful jazz and blues singer, Billie Holiday along with by far the most faithful companion she ever managed to befriend during her all too brief life - her dog. Besides Holidays, mirrors, lights and dogs, the photograph - which is part of the Library of Congress collection on Flickr Commons - contains a host of other potential visual prompts. You, as always, are free to follow whichever you want to - or none at all if you so choose. Just give us some old photo and some new words and add a link to the list below.

You will find details of the next two image prompts below and a link to the prompts up to the end of March in the sidebar. And if I can manage to get my act together, you will find a link to all the image prompts from April until June before the sun as set too many times.

In order to get you in a suitable mood, let me leave you with a little bit of Billie, right back at the start of her career.

A dressing room, a hair decoration and a disdainful dog? So what can I make out of this week's prompt photograph? I have chosen to tell the story of hairdresser "Elise" - or more rightly Elsie Oldham of Blackpool, (1906-1989), my mother's second cousin.

Sepia Saturday

Launched by Alan Burnett and Kat Mortensen in 2009, Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind (they don't have to be sepia) become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, all we ask is that your sign up to the weekly Linky List, that you try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and that you have fun.